


battle wounds

by sheila_amour



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, getting shot is never fun and neither is emotional trauma, some descriptions of violence but nothing graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28064418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheila_amour/pseuds/sheila_amour
Summary: He’s surprisingly used to the taste of blood in his mouth. It’s the feeling of rusted metal, like an old coin rolling around his tongue. The bullet in his leg is new.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Comments: 3
Kudos: 99
Collections: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2020





	battle wounds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMintJulep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMintJulep/gifts).



> I know you enjoy some classic ‘partner-gets-injured-on-a-mission’ hurt/comfort trope and I’m here to deliver as best as I can. I hope you enjoy it and happy holidays!

He’s surprisingly used to the taste of blood in his mouth. It’s the feeling of rusted metal, like an old coin rolling around his tongue. The bullet in his leg is new. It blooms throughout his thigh in a wave of heat, followed by a searing pain that seems to burn each one of his nerves. It’s all he can do not to collapse. He holds himself against a tree, grits his teeth as his vision begins to blacken, and wills himself to forget the pain and forge on. The safe house can’t be more than a mile from here, he thinks. He just has to keep walking.

He doesn’t know how long it was, exactly, but it felt like he had walked for an eternity before he finally found the door to the safe house. He opens the door and the pain in his leg is so bad it’s a feat unto itself that he doesn’t collapse to the ground right there. He leans against the doorframe to steady himself.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Illya steadies his vision to see Napoleon standing before him, a look of concern on his face.

“Got shot,” he rasps out, feeling weaker than he has in years. He feels as though his legs might give out any second now. 

He feels Napoleon take his limp arm and wrap it around his shoulders. Illya leans in, placing his weight on him. Napoleon leads him down the hallway, the floor beginning to blur as he does so, and into the bathroom.

“Jesus, Peril, it’s like you’ve never been shot before.”

Illya gives him a weak smile. “I try to avoid it.”

“Probably for the best,” Napoleon concedes, rummaging in the bathroom cupboards above the sink. He turns on the sink and Illya tries to focus on the sound of running water to ground him. He closes his eyes, letting it wash over him. When he opens his eyes the water has stopped and Napoleon is kneeling in front of him with a pair of scissors.

“Let me take a look at it,” he says.

Illya watches as he cuts away the pieces of bloodstained fabric until a wide stretch of his thigh is bare and exposed in the fluorescent lights of the bathroom. Napoleon studies it for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Well,” he says eventually, “it doesn’t look too deep. You’re lucky for that. With a good enough pair of tweezers I can get that out of you. I’ll grab you a glass of water.”

Illya nods.

Napoleon gets up and Illya watches his back as he disappears out of the bathroom. When he returns he has a glass in his hand, a third full of what looks suspiciously like whiskey.

“What happened to water?” Illya asks, looking hesitantly at the glass before him.

“This is going to hurt like a motherfucker. Better to feel as little as you can.”

Illya takes the glass, and with trembling hands throws it back. It burns all the way down, sharp in his throat and warm in his stomach. He lets it settle and he hopes to god it works. Just because he can tolerate the pain doesn’t mean he enjoys it.

It, unfortunately, doesn’t do much. Napoleon was right. It did, as he put it, ‘hurt like a motherfucker’. He clenches his fists and closes his eyes and pretends it’s not there. He’s not sure how much time has passed before Napoleon is stringing some kind of thread through the wound. He remembers at some point the sharp sting of rubbing alcohol and the deep burn of iodine. It seems to be somewhere between a second and an eternity before Napoleon finishes the last stitch.

“Sorry,” Napoleon says as Illya looks at the jagged black lines of thread coming in and out of his skin. “There’s going to be some shrapnel in there still. It’s these goddamn bullets they use. Almost as bad as the Germans. I did the best I could.”

Napoleon gets up, turning his attention to the sink. He drains the water from it, now pink with Illya’s blood. The counter is littered with blood-soaked tissue and the scattered articles of a first aid kit.

“I forget that; that you were in the war,” Illya says. The man he’s known doesn’t look much like a soldier; not when he’s got his Armani shirt sleeves rolled up to avoid getting blood on them.

“So do I, sometimes.” Napoleon leans against the sink. He’s not really looking at Illya, but at the wall and past it and somewhere far away. “Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like a memory anymore. It’s like it happened to somebody else. I see pictures of myself back then and it’s like I don’t even recognize my own face.”

Illya knows this feeling all too well. Whenever he thinks of home and that Russian village he cannot believe that it was his own, that that was his origin. He feels so distanced sometimes he thinks he never really came from anywhere at all.

“Well, enough of that,” Napoleon says, shaken out of whatever daze he had just found himself in, “Why don’t you get some chess out and I’ll make dinner?”

He offers his hand to Illya, who scowls and pushes it away.

“I can handle myself, Cowboy.”

Napoleon simply shrugs. “If you say so.”

* * *

Napoleon is dicing something in the kitchen; Illya recognizes the sharp sounds of the knife. He’s drinking water on the sofa a few feet away in the living room, desperately wishing one of them was smart enough to remember to bring painkillers. _Gaby would have some,_ he thinks wistfully.

But mostly he’s thinking. He’s thinking about Napoleon in the bathroom with that far away look and surprises himself with the depths of desperation he has to understand it. To see if it’s similar to his own.

“What was the war like?” He asks, attempting nonchalance to cover up his trepidation.

For a moment the slicing stops.

“Boring,” Napoleon says after a beat, “I spent most of my time on a boat. Spent a lot of time playing cards.”

“Cheating at cards,” Illya corrects, not unkindly.

Napoleon breaks into a broad grin. “How else would I win?”

Illya finds a grin of his own on his face. He settles back into the sofa, back into the sound of chopping carrots.

“I watched a lot of men die. I was the youngest. They had me carrying bodies, pulling fragments of bombs and bullets out of people until I smelled like blood. The whole ship would smell like that after a battle; like salt and blood. That’s most of what I remember.”

Illya turns to look at him but Napoleon has already gone back to his carrots, chopping forcefully and refusing to meet Illya’s eyes.

* * *

The pain makes it impossible to sleep. Illya lies there on the rough mattress, stiff as a board, body barely covered by a threadbare blanket. If he moves it sends shocks of pain down his leg.

After what feels like hours he finally gives up on the hope of sleep. With the strength he can muster, he pulls himself from the bed and limps down the hall, a hand on the wall to steady himself.

He sits on the large sofa in the living room with the lamp low, thinking pensively in the half darkness. He feels comfortable settled in with his thoughts here, in the stillness of the early morning. It is still black as velvet outside. The sky outside the window is littered with stars.

“What are you doing up?”

Illya can see the shadow of Napoleon making his way towards him.

“I can’t sleep. It hurts,” Illya says with his head low. He feels so incredibly ashamed admitting to this but he doesn’t know why.

Napoleon’s got a strange look on his face, like he’s wanting to say something but he doesn’t; he just stands there.

“I’ll get you a glass of water,” he says finally.

When Napoleon returns from the kitchen he has two glasses of whiskey in his hand. Illya raises a quizzical eyebrow at him.

“It’ll be better for the pain.”

Illya takes the glass from him with a huff. “What is your excuse?” He says, nodding to the other glass in Napoleon’s hand.

“Camaraderie. Rule number one, Peril; never leave a friend drinking alone.”

Illya feels himself breaking into a smile. “I’ll remember that.”

They sit in silence, nursing their whiskey in the dark quiet of the evening. It’s always so still in the mountains. Illya’s always loved them for that quiet. There’s a peace to it, but also a loneliness, deep and bone-cutting. A vast and endless emptiness.

But now, with Napoleon at his side there is less loneliness and more peace. It’s comfortable and warm, like the crackling of a fire. The whiskey dulls the pain in his leg, but he knows all the warmth comes from the company beside him.

“Waverly’s sending up a team,” Napoleon says after some time. “They’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

“We’re cutting the mission short?”

The shame is back; the sense of failure that haunts him like a ghost wherever he goes. He wants to stand up right then, say that he’s fine, that it’s nothing at all and really they should just carry on.

Napoleon seems to sense this in his eyes. “Gaby said that if I don’t get you to rest she’ll personally see to it that you don’t get out of bed for a week when you get back,” he warns.

Illya has to stop himself from laughing. “Crazy girl,” he says with fondness.

“Yeah, she is.”

When he turns to look at him Napoleon is smiling, too.

The silence falls upon them once again like a woolen blanket. They keep their place even when the whiskey runs dry and when the first hints of dawn begin to creep their way into the sky. Their only movements are the ones they make to close the gap between each other. Illya’s fingers find themselves tangled with Napoleon’s when the dawn finally breaks.

**Author's Note:**

> No I don’t know how getting shot actually works no I don’t care to know either.


End file.
